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Crowd Clinical Use Twitter to Rank US Hospitals

Thankfully, there is no Tripadvisor page for hospitals, I'm not sure I would be able to carry on existing in that world. Hospitals do, however, take public opinion extremely seriously (and if they don't, they should), but it can difficult to actually collate that data and use it effectively. Suggestion boxes can only get you so far.

Of course, there is one, very comprehensive source of public opinion that can provably be used extremely effectively - Twitter. If you've been to hospital, the chances are you're going to want to talk about it and the likelihood of you taking to the internet to do so is probably pretty high. This is the thinking Crowd Clinical are applying, as they are currently going through the motions of putting together a database of public opinion about different hospitals, all sourced from Twitter.

When it's finished, the database will allow you to search through different hospitals, comparing and contrasting them based on parameters like engagement, online presence, and presumably numerous other, opinion-based factors. This could potentially help people decide which hospital is the ideal one to live near or even help the hospitals themselves recognise areas in which they need to improve.

Currently, the site only has a set of 3 top 10 lists - the most followed hospitals, the ones which tweet most frequently and finally the best in terms of sentiment. The first two are important, since they reflect which hospital Twitter accounts are really worth following, but the third is by far the most interesting. Crowd Clinical scan through tweets, detecting which ones actually reflect patient sentiment, and then whether said sentiment is positive or negative.

This system transforms those tweets from simple venting into something that both hospitals and patients can actually use. People often broadcast their opinion on a cafe or nightclub but being able to walk into a hospital knowing that you're going to receive the optimal care is a far more valuable resource. Twitter provides a far broader spread of information than surveying standards agencies might get, at least in terms of patient satisfaction. It will be interesting to keep an eye on Crowd Clinical as this system advances.

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